By Willard S. Squire
Our Fathers, Who Art in Canton
Hallowed be thy Game
Please Don’t Let The Patritos Win this Fuicking Game
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I told you this would happen.
Like an inverse Paul Revere, I rode into town shouting from the top of my lungs that the Bostonians were coming.
And so they came.
It wasn’t the 45-0 blowout that I predicted, no this was much worse. I could’ve lived with a blowout, I could’ve lived with a close game with the Pat’s pulling it out with a game sealing drive, the last seconds running out, strangling out any hope of a Chiefs win and general joy in life.
But the Pats winning in overtime, on the first possession, and without Mahomes even getting a chance to touch the ball? That one put a pit in the center of my stomach.
That was an absolute classic of a playoff game and it was ruined by a fucking dud of an ending. It deserved better. We deserved better.
Yet, if you think about it, it was the perfectly Patriot way to end a game.
Boring, efficient, and taking advantage of bullshit rules.
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Let's talk about those overtime rules.
They’re hot garbage.
The NFL’s overtime rules are the worst out of the big three american sports.
How in the world can you end the first overtime of a professional game without both teams at least getting a chance to score?
Thankfully baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, bowling, and calvinball don’t have that issue. Just the NFL comes down to the theoretical whim of a coin flip. Yes, I know “Well football is a team sport, the defense just needs to get one stop.” Fuck off, a defense is completely gassed by the end of a playoff game, and even more so by the time overtime starts. Most teams will score some type points on that opening drive in OT, but in this game, with those two offenses, who ever got that first possession was going to drive down the field and win the game.
You call it speculation, I call it the truth.
And fuck off twice if you think the ending we got was better because Mahomes never even got the chance to touch the ball. It wasn’t. I don’t care if he threw an interception on the first play, he deserved the opportunity to throw that pick. He drove the Chiefs down in the clutch, putting them in position to tie the game with a field goal. His reward? He got to watch his team lose that game from the sidelines, hopeless and unable to do anything about it, all due to the whim of a coin. That just seems wrong to me, and I think the NFL should put some thought into fixing it.
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Speaking of things wrong that the NFL should fix, I think the majority of football fans can agree that they (the officials, Roger Goodell, the Football Gods) fucked this one up.
But.
And this is a big but.
Y’all know they’re not going to send the Saints to the Super Bowl off of an obscure rule that they would never enact for a regular season game, let alone the result of an conference championship game. I get the unfairness of the whole situation, it was one of the worst no-calls I’ve ever seen, but just stop it. There was this weird sense of hope that it would actually happen, even up to media week, a mere six days away from the Super Bowl, where both teams are already in atlanta, practicing and taking questions from the press, and people still believed that the incredibly silent Goodell was going to boot the Ram’s out and put in the Saints. Not respectable people involved in sports, but just people in the streets, shouting like the lunatics that they are, demanding that the fair thing happens in life.
What poor fucking idiots.
The Game Itself
Seriously, if you’re listening, please don’t let them, thy evil hoard, win the Super Bowl,
Again.
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This is probably the most even sided match up we’ve gotten in years.
The young vs the old. The talented vs the experienced. Team vs scheme.
I honestly don’t know how good or bad either of these teams actually are when speaking strictly in their matchups against one another. Pats offense vs the Rams offense? You could take either, have a good argument for it, and the next person would look at you if you just bit a chicken's head clean off. The same goes for each one of these teams components. Yet each one essentially comes down to this: The Rams have collectively way more talent, but the Patriots have played a lot better with what they have, less talented as they might be.
That kind of fucks you up when you’re trying to really break down this game. Yeah, you’d take Todd Gurley over James White every single time from a talent perspective, but James White has been fucking unstoppable for this Pats offense all year long. You know that when he’s in the game that they’re going to throw him the ball, but yet due to Brady’s quick delivery and the Pats play calling, he’s pretty much always uncovered by opposing defenses. You go down the line between these two teams and you find yourself in this same exact quandaries over and over again, and it almost always seems to sway in the Patriots favor. The Rams D-line vs the Pats? Surely you’d take Aaron Donald and Nodomican Suh, but the Patriots have been going sack crazy in these playoff games!
I don’t want to kill off all hope here, Nostradamus as I am, because I do think that the Patriots performance these playoffs have been a bit deceiving, just has its been all season. They were gifted that two seed by playing the Jets and Bills the last two weeks of the season after falling apart in Pittsburg, allowing them to recipe and prevent the sky from falling. Then, and I know this is a wild thing to say, they were gifted the right opponents in the playoffs. The Chargers were always going to shit the bed against the Pats, especially so in Foxborough. They just can’t help that Brady owns Phillip Rivers and his twenty kids. The Chiefs were a tough matchup yes, but they knew how to play them from their previous matchup, and their power run offense was killer against that Chiefs defense, which was awful against the run all year. Plus Andy Reid was coaching the Chiefs and y’all know he wasn’t going to beat Belichick. These great performances masked a dark truth we all know: This Patriots team is seriously devoid of talent. Their elite players are old and slow, and not playing as well as they used to. Brady, outside of owning the Chargers, was downright bad at points in the game against the Chiefs, and would have lost them that game if Dee Ford was another foot back. Gronk will get one big catch, and then “block really well” for the rest of the game. I’m so glad he’s found a new calling as a left left tackle. Edelman continues to defy age and an ACL tear, but even he’s not playing at his dread inducing levels of past seasons. The defense, as good as its been playing, is old and slow too, and really started to show its cracks late against the Chiefs. Stop telling Stephon Gilmore is actually one of the best cornerbacks in the NFL, he’s bound to blow his coverage harder than someone trying to get water turned on for a scam music festival.
This Rams team has the talent to go out and punch New England in the face and not stop punching until the evil has finally been vanquished from this earth. We all know that Brady has trouble when dealing with pressure straight up the middle. No one does this better than Aaron Donald and his boys. They could be the key to winning this game for LA. Goff could come out and play like the #1 pick that he is, and Gurly could be healthy and become the human wrecking ball he was for the majority of the regular season. Or they never establish the run, which then lessens the effect of their play action and kills their offensive flow, allowing the Patriots to dink and dunk their way to a two possession lead, killing time while they do it.
This will be a close game, where the young mastermind McVay (y’all have heard of him right?) plays chess against the grandmaster. It will come down to the last play and the winner won’t win by more than six points. I’m going to pick the Rams, partly to jinx us all, partly because I want to believe that there is good in this world. Mostly it's just going to jinx us though.
Either way, I think this is going to be a very good game.